Remember when it was trendy to have a fire dancing on your television screen? Well, now you can have a fireplace that looks like a television screen. Brilliant!
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Let the ‘rithm hit ‘em…
February 23, 2009
Algorithm and design are occasionally strange bedfellows.
The discussion of design as a discipline and endeavor unto itself is an important one. And, as has always been the case, beautiful and surprising results often emerge when this discipline partners with available technology. This summer, I read an interview with Jeff Kipnis in the AA’s DRL Ten where he vehemently states that architecture is not science or research, it is design. I think this is a critical distinction that needs to be discussed, insofar as the role of technology and advanced computational techniques are involved. The architect, in my opinion, should not relinquish his design to a script or algorithm. Mastery of the sundry tools available to today’s practitioner should allow a fluid an coherent design across all of these media, and the intervening hand of the architect should be felt, if not readily apparent, in the output. In schools such as the AA, Pratt, SCI-Arc and others, this idea is finding a place. Exploration of the architects role in design in this changed technological arena is vital.
Interview with Alejandro Zaera Polo
May 1, 2008From an interview conducted on November 11, 2007, by Nathan King and Severn Clay-Youman.
TARP: We’d like to start by asking about your thoughts on the relationship between academic architecture and professional practice. Specifically regarding how the academic setting feeds FOA’s professional practice.
AZP: The act of teaching is very much about rationalizing and verbally articulating the operations you follow when you perform as an architect. This skill becomes quite handy once you have to explain or put a project into any kind of context because you have been trained to explain what your processes are and the reasons why you are doing things, and you are better able to be accountable for your decisions. However, there exists a gap, a very important gap, for an academic architect in relating their work to certain methods of production, or certain demands existing in the market. Even so, that capacity to explain becomes very useful to mobilize the potentials within all these more professional, let’s say, more “real” knowledge that our practice is now engaged with.
TARP: Does this professional/academic relationship work in the other direction, i.e., is the academic environment ever an opportunity to test the ideas you develop in your professional practice?
AZP: Yes and no, because I think that the hypotheses that you address when you are approaching academic exercises are different from the problems that you face when you are doing a real project. You can test some ideas but the tests that you conduct in reality originate in a different field of operations. So professional practice is not about demonstrating a certain point, it’s about being able to bring together a number of market forces and present technologies encountered outside of academia and threading a certain rationale through them that will hopefully become a device for producing something new. I think the main transfer between the academic and professional practice is not so much in being able to test the same hypothesis in one field or another, but to address the academic demand to explain and articulate given problems.
I think academically oriented practices have an advantage. Architects who do not have the same academic training, who have built their entire career in the practice domain, often what you see is that they react very quickly to satisfy certain demands that come from the outside and are structuring the material in a way that doesn’t try to produce any further effect.
